NEAR Operator

Selects documents containing specified search terms within close proximity to one another. Document scores are calculated based on the number of words between search terms in each document as compared to each of the other documents. If the search expression includes two words and those words occur next to each other in a document, the region size is two words long. Thus, the document with the smallest possible region containing all search terms always receives the highest score. Documents in which the search terms do not appear within 1000 words of each one another are not returned, because even if all the search terms appear in the document, they are probably too far apart to be meaningful within the context of the document.

The NEAR operator is similar to the other proximity operators in the sense that the search terms you enter must be found within close proximity of one another. However, unlike other proximity operators, the NEAR operator compares the proximity of the search terms in each document to the proximity of the search terms in each of the other documents and assigns scores based on its calculations. For example, when the search expression NEAR is used to find two words close to each other, a document that has the specified words within five words of each other is scored higher than a document that has the specified words within nine words of each other.

To retrieve relevance-ranked documents that contain stemmed variations of the words "war" and "peace" within close proximity to each other, you can enter the following:

war <NEAR> peace

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